FROM THE INDUSTRY contacts at BT, did a demand stimulation campaign, and within a year it went from 69% to 96%. And time to move on again! Head-hunted again? Yes – just in the right place at the right time again. Sage asked me to go back up north to work on product strategy and management. I had a great couple of years with Sage and loved living in Northumberland. I ran in the Great North Run and ran my first marathon while I was there (just 15 minutes slower than Steve Cram!).
A younger James on his graduation from UCL
Does that bring us to GreySky?
That’s right. I started GreySky in 2005 – which brought together most of the experience I’d developed the previous 15 years or so. And again, Microsoft heard I’d left Sage and wanted to launch a competitor programme, so they asked me to do corporate strategy work for them. Nice first project to have on the CV! Exactly – only a small project, but a nice start. Then I needed to start the business properly – including a website, of course. I realised I had no idea how to do one myself. I’d always had teams for that. I went to a Business Link course that was appalling – the instructor said we’d design websites in Microsoft Word. I left after 15 minutes with the booklet, which ended with “the next job is to publish to the internet; this can be quite frustrating” – and that was it, no instructions! I agreed with the Business Link manager that I would create a proper course with Serif software, charged £35 including free software worth around £100, and started rolling it out through Business Link across Northumberland. Other areas were giving courses away free and nobody turned up. We charged and filled every session. This is so impressive James. What happened next? I suppose through my involvement with Business Link, I got involved with local enterprise development and approving projects for government funding. That’s how I saw there was £250,000 available for the North East to support the development
of broadband projects. I immediately saw what I needed to do, and wrote a project application to secure all of the Northeast funding for Northumberland. That became the Rural Community Broadband Fund. Which led to European procurement with your own money? I had to do European procurement for £250,000 that I didn’t have. This was 2008 – the banking crash. I thought I’d remortgage my house, but the bank laughed at me. Eventually the council funded it first. But I always tell consultants: start by doing procurement with a quarter million of your own money because it focuses the mind wonderfully. You make sure you don’t get it wrong.
What happened then?
I spent about a year arguing with DEFRA about state aid approval. They said it didn’t need state aid approval. I said it did. Eventually their lawyers agreed with me – though I got no apology. I went directly to the European Commission and became the first in the country to get community state aid approval. Which meant when other projects started, I was the only person who could say I’d actually done it. I was on holiday on the North Yorkshire
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DECEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.4
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